Houston council OKs Sprint contract for city phones

Mayor wins approval for Sprint wireless pactParker says plan is $3 million less than AT&T's

CHRIS MORAN, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 5:30 am, Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Mayor Annise Parker barely secured a City Council majority on Wednesday to approve a $10 million wireless services contract with Sprint Solutions that her administration had been working on for a year.

Sprint replaces AT&T as the provider of cellphones, push-to-talk devices, emergency communications and data services for most city departments. Parker signaled the importance of the contract by having a Sprint satellite truck parked next to City Hall to demonstrate emergency communications capabilities, by sending her council liaison around to give council members a look at the phones they would be issued in an emergency and by publicly accusing opponents of the deal of being in thrall to labor unions. AT&T is a union shop. Sprint is not.

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Parker distributed a memo to the council on Monday that indicates Sprint beat AT&T by $3 million in competing proposals. Yet Parker still faced opposition.

"It's about the unions playing hardball with council members, and it's about council members crumbling," Parker said.

Sprint opponents raised the union issue but also questioned whether Sprint offered a superior package of technologies, and they argued that the thousands of local AT&T employees who far outnumber local Sprint employees would better protect or restore the city's communications in a disaster. The vote was 8-6.

Parker also got caught up in the politics of the contract when her campaign treasurer registered as a lobbyist for Sprint last month. She replaced him two weeks later.

The five-year contract calls for Sprint to provide as many as 6,193 cell phones. That would be nearly enough to issue a phone to roughly a third of all city employees.

Bradford said the ratio could be even higher depending on how many phones have been issued under other contracts. He expects the a report on the transition from AT&T to Sprint to include an update on how the cellphones are deployed.

"I can't possibly envision the need for every other employee having a cellphone," Bradford said after the meeting. "If the plan is to do that, you can bet I have a dozen more questions."